ALMOST*DREAMING

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada

The piece was installed in 12 spaces not usually used for display: behind false walls; alongside exhibition spaces, on closed circuit video screens, between gallery walls and the windows outside.

The lobby video monitor displayed a walk through the building's basement electrics and boiler room intermingled with details from a rose garden; audio works in discrete outlying spaces echoed through the halls; the center rotunda supported an industrial fishing net with hudreds of pounds of ice dripping onto a copper soundplate two floors below; sculptural elements overlapped between the installations, building a complex narrative somewhere between a fairy tale and the ordinariness of everyday life –

SOUND AND NARRATION

Recordings of the duet from an amateur production of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta echo throughout the building with narration and mutterings overlapping in-between.

I was quite young and just about to fall asleep but I pulled myself suddenly back and realizing the enormity at the edge of my consciousness became rigid with terror until trembling with exhaustion I submitted to a leap of faith that the dailyness of my life would continue – How long have I been like this?

I was nearly awake and almost dreaming but with a heart and a will that still controlled the response, when I noticed in a passing glance a window - so that while outside I remained steeled to the faintest gesture, inside I succumbed to desire, but then marking an end in a begining - almost dreaming - soldiered on.

ALTERED SPACES

CATALOG

An oversized catalog was published with essays by curator Lorna Farrel-Ward and Greg Snider.

"..the parts continue to dismantle themselves while we are in the very act of reassembling them, then reforming as we try to take them apart... The work resists being taken in at once, but each part reminds us of parts not seen or heard while simultaneously recalling our own seeing and hearing: that is our own reflexive consciousness. The work's mimesis of contemporary culture gives rise to a reflection on that culture in a way that seems, spontaneous and affective, as an integral condition of the work.

Part of this expansive character is the absorption and internalization of the building itself. Most specifically the inversion of the interior and exterior, the turning inside out that runs through the piece, constitutes a fiction enthralled in fact..."

Greg Snider
excerpt from catalog Joey Morgan's Almost*Dreaming, The Space Between the Studio and the Gallery